“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now if you believe in one life only, then such conditions will seem most disastrous, and in your terms they clearly are not pretty. Yet, though each victim in an epidemic may die his or her own death, that death becomes part of a mass social protest. The lives of intimate survivors are shaken, and according to the extent of the epidemic the various elements of social life itself are disturbed, altered, rearranged. Sometimes such epidemics are eventually responsible for the overthrow of governments, the loss of wars.

Dictation: (Pause, one of many.) Now: To a certain extent (underlined), epidemics are the result of a mass suicide phenomenon on the parts of those involved. Biological, sociological, or even economic factors may be involved, in that for a variety of reasons, and at different levels, whole groups of individuals want to die at any given time — but in such a way that their individual deaths amount to a mass statement.

The epidemics then serve many purposes — warning that certain conditions will not be tolerated. There is a biological outrage that will be continually expressed until the conditions are changed.

[...] The person might fall prey to an epidemic, but the smoothness of biological motion or psychological motion has been lost. [...] To that extent, you cannot separate issues like a population explosion on the part of certain portions of the world, from epidemics, earthquakes, and other disasters.

THE EVENTS OF “NATURE.”
EPIDEMICS AND NATURAL DISASTERS

[...] At 10:14 in the 697th session for that work, he made this statement: “I will have more to say concerning illnesses, epidemics, and mass disorders in this book.”

I am speaking particularly of epidemics that are less than deadly, though danger is involved. [...] Flu epidemics become social excuses for much needed rest, therefore, and serve as face-saving devices so that the individuals can hide from themselves their inner difficulties. In a way, such epidemics provide their own kind of fellowship — giving common meeting grounds for those of disparate circumstances. The [epidemics] serve as accepted states of illness, in which people are given an excuse for the rest or quiet self-examination they desperately need but do not feel entitled to otherwise.

[...] For now I would like to mention some other issues, involving the individual’s connection either with natural disasters or with epidemics of one kind or another, that by definition concern large groups of people.

[...] Many therefore “fall prey” to epidemics of one kind or another because they want to, though they might deny this quite vigorously.

[...] Senility is a mental and physical epidemic — a needless one. [...]

[...] All epidemics, however, are mass statements both biologically and psychically. [...]

[...] If mass action against appalling social or political conditions is not effective, then other means are taken, and these are often in the guise of epidemics or natural disasters. [...]

[...] It is quite within the probabilities that the statistics will reverse themselves and that for no reason that scientists can discover, children are born stillborn, as in a mass epidemic, and that entities simply refuse to inhabit the bodies made for them. [...]

[...] An earthwide epidemic took place on one occasion. [...]

[...] If your purposes do not involve illness, for instance, and yet if you believe in contagion, you will automatically avoid circumstances that can lead to epidemics. [...]

I will have more to say concerning illnesses, epidemics, and mass disorders in this book.

(Pause.) You have occasional epidemics that flare up, with victims left dead. [...]

[...] Those people succumbed to an epidemic of beliefs, to an environment [that was] closed mentally and physically. [...]

Now: I said, in book dictation, I believe (in the 835th session), that the people of Jonestown died of an epidemic of beliefs — or words to that effect. [...]

[...] As I mentioned earlier (in Session 821), each person caught in either an epidemic or a natural disaster will have private reasons for choosing those circumstances. [...]

[...]

[...] Epidemics of Beliefs, and Effective Mental ‘Inoculations’ Against Despair.”

[...] You can see this for example in epidemics.

[...] “The flu season” is in a way an example of a psychologically-manufactured pattern that can at times bring about a manufactured epidemic.

The inoculations themselves do little good overall, and they can be potentially dangerous, particularly when they are given to prevent an epidemic which has not in fact occurred. [...]

[...] The child who gets the mumps with a large number of his classmates, however, knows he has his private reasons for joining into such a mass biological reality, and usually the adult who “falls prey” to a flu epidemic has little conscious awareness of his own reasons for such a situation. [...]

[...] The cause of epidemics, say, is as I have given it in the early chapters of Mass Reality. [...]

[...] Negative expectations, far from protecting either the individual or those with whom he comes in contact, will actually, to a greater or lesser degree, turn as destructive as any epidemic.

[...] Something like it must happen in epidemics, too. [...]